Politics & International Relations
American Independence Movement
The American Independence Movement was a political movement that emerged in the 1760s and 1770s in the thirteen American colonies. It was driven by a desire for greater autonomy and self-government, and ultimately led to the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States as an independent nation.
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3 Key excerpts on "American Independence Movement"
eBook - PDFA World Safe for Commerce
American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China
- Dale C. Copeland(Author)
- 2024(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
63 3 The Origins of the War for Colonial Independence the war for American independence from Great Britain, fought from 1775 to 1783, set the foundation for much of what transpired in American foreign policy over the next two centuries. The war not only created a country whose com- mitment to ideals of liberty brought into question the legitimacy of the absolut- ist states of Europe, it also introduced to the world system a land-rich and dy- namic nation that these states knew might one day challenge them in both commercial and military power. Yet surprisingly, the War for Colonial Independence is rarely studied by international relations scholars, presumably because it seems to be a case of civil strife within a political unit rather than an “inter-national” conflict. Narrowly defined, this of course is true, since the Americans were seeking to break from an imperial realm that they had been a part of for a century and a half. Yet if we look at how the war broke out in 1775–76, this is clearly a conflict between thirteen political units (the colonies) that had seen themselves as essentially free to run their internal affairs and a power (Britain) that sought to restrict these traditional rights. Moreover, in the 1760s each of the thirteen colonies, unlike in British Canada or East and West Florida, had its own functioning political structure and elites that made deci- sions for their specific colony independent of London, even if the crown often had a final say on legislation. Hence when these elites gathered in Philadelphia in September 1774 for the first Continental Congress, they were acting as if they already had the legal power to commit their fellow colonists to a common strat- egy and to use established institutional tools to enforce the colonies’ agree- ments.
eBook - ePub- Dorothy Marshall(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
17THE INFLUENCE OF THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE ON DOMESTIC POLITICS
1. EFFECT OF THE WAR ON POLITICAL GROUPSTHOUGH the metaphor must not be pushed too far there is some justification for regarding the American War of Independence as the watershed that divides eighteenth- from nineteenth-century England. Certainly after Saratoga Anglo-Irish relations began to take another direction and even more after Yorktown the slogan ‘measures not men’ began to assume some political reality. The year 1772 can well be considered as seeing the final flowering of the eighteenth-century constitution. George III was, as he intended to be, the head of his own ministers, choosing them yet acting with and through them in conjunction with a loyal and co-operative Parliament. Through Lord North his relations with the Commons were easy; corruption and influence alone will not explain the harmony between them and the King. The opposition groups, weak and divided, were as voices crying in the wilderness and events seemed unlikely to make straight their path before them. In 1772 there was very little indication of the humiliations to come. Yet by 1782 a revolt of the independent members of the Commons had forced North to resign and George III, much against his will, to appoint Rockingham as First Lord of the Treasury in his place.1The vital factor responsible for this dramatic change was the American War of Independence. The fortunes of that struggle provide the necessary clue to the situation which developed at Westminster between 1772 and 1782; at no time was the impact of war on English domestic politics greater than during these years. In 1772 the prospects of North’s administration seemed good. The months following Grafton’s resignation had seen several interesting new appointments. The first of these was that of Edward Thurlow who replaced Dunning as Solicitor-General in March 1770.1
eBook - PDFThe Ideology of Creole Revolution
Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought
- Joshua Simon(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
5 Even authors who have insisted on the United States’ exceptionalism have done so almost exclusively with reference to Europe, arguing that the “absence of feudalism” in North American history made the con- stellation of political forces that arose in the independence movement and shaped the early republic’s institutions utterly unlike any European Comparing Revolutions 5 5 analogue. 6 From the first, then, the independence movement of the United States has been treated as either an exemplary or an exceptional event in a north Atlantic age of revolutions: a wave of agitation unified, primarily, by Enlightened philosophies and anti-monarchical aims. Latin Americans have rarely been regarded as important participants in this period of trans-Atlantic upheaval. 7 Instead, their roughly contem- poraneous break with European rule has been treated as the consequence of an early or “incipient” nationalism: a sense of separate American iden- tity and a resulting desire for independence, which formed gradually over the course of the colonial period and crystallized in the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century. 8 According to this view, European persecution inspired Spanish Americans to think of themselves as Peruvians or Chileans, for example, rather than as Spaniards, and then to seek independence for these administrative subunits of the Spanish Empire in order to bring political sovereignty into alignment with their new national identities. The identification of nationalism, as opposed to anti-monarchism, as the central motivation of Latin America’s independence movements has long governed scholarship on their intellectual history. The clearest evi- dence of its influence is a historical and social-scientific literature that largely adopts the region’s present-day national boundaries as natural units of analysis.
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